Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?
It feels like the majority of content is no longer organic or passion driven. It is now monetisation driven content.
It's similar to Google. It used to be index of useful organic information, created for practical reasons (regardless of Google). Now it is just an index of adverts and spam created for Google monetisation.
Even some famous tech review channels just seem like marketing/pr product shills to me now.
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I searched for a software tutorial on Youtube and 90% of results are talking heads.
184 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadThe trend I dislike is 'shorts' which are encouraged by YouTube. An obvious nod to TikTok, which ironically now allows longer videos - a maximum of 10 minutes.
So to sum up: yes, there is lots of rubbish on YouTube (as to be expected), but there is also plenty of watchable content - whether it's silly, informative, education, music or a myriad of other types. Is it unhealthy to consume too much? I guess that's a question for a different discussion.
Looking at the sorts of channels represented by Standard, they're at the top of their game and doing better than ever. - https://standard.tv/
Yes there's a ton of crap too, but I think this is just a symptom of YouTube being truly mainstream now. There are areas that do better and worse on this. I'd agree that programming tutorials aren't good, but I've never found YouTube to be good for programming tutorials. Conference talks tend to be much better.
Nowadays I start with a forum/reddit/discord/hn search for a list of hive approved creators and only then go to youtube with that list in hand. Starting the search in youtube (unless for a very niche/non-marketable topics) is close to worthless.
A wake-up call that a single company annihilated our ability to sort out information for ourselves. I'm still rather disturbed and shaken.
How can you sort something you know nothing about?
Downvotes, and their ratio to upvotes, were an important signal to get an idea of how good the video overall was.
It's a pointless feature at this point if you ask me.
It drives me CRAZY!
How often I want to know something about a product (something less popular than smartphones, let's say IP cameras) and I find only ~3 reviews, I watch them all and they are all full of BS, because the reviewer has no experience with the product type they are given, they just follow the manual/or some given instructions by the sponsor how to make the product work. So I still know nothing about the product, its pros and cons and I can spot mistakes and BS even in those basic info that was given. In this specific case of IP cameras for example there are TONS of videos NOT showing the real video feed (recordings) from the camera, they just record the smartphone screen with another smartphone/camera and that's it.
I watch those videos to learn something new about the product (actual pros and cons, specific feature implementations, ...). But most of the time the "reviewer" basically reads the product description and goes over the list of features that I can find on literally any shop page that has that product.
It's so hard to find videos of people that have actually used the product for longer periods of time and can give an actual review.
Nowadays all review article just work off the specs without using and testing the products. And the user reviews have moved to Amazon, which are mostly very poor quality or just fakes, or possibly reviews for other products. In any case, there are no incentives to give high quality reviews of products, and google seems to have no incentive to show me the few remaining real review blogs.
I've also found user reviews on Home Depot to be more helpful than most. I'm not sure what they're doing to combat spam, but it seems to be working.
When I discovered this practice from a well known SEO guru, I was both sad and angry.
Meanwhile if you ignore all the commercial Youtubers and look for regular people using the product, you might end up with a more 'authentic' review, but also with an equally uninformative one, as most people just don't have access to all the latest tech gadgets on the market. They just have the one they are reviewing right now, so it's hard to get any meaningful comparisons.
There are a couple of good review sites left, but not nearly enough to cover all the tech stuff that gets released in the wild.
This is it isnt it. When they removed downvoting I figured it didnt matter, but really youtube really got past its peak because of this.
[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/return-youtub...
YT, or even videos in general, don't have a monopoly for that though. Eg. in my country some Sundays are shopping, some are not. Every now and then I need to google it out to find out if the shops are open next Sunday, and inevitably at the top of search results will sit a 4 screens long blog post starting with an 'immersive' story to the tune of "Imagine you wake up on Sunday morning, and your fridge is empty. That's a bummer, huh?", followed by paragraphs and paragraphs of such fluff with the only information any sane person could care about buried somewhere near the end : )
And it's become so professional, so impersonal, that watching now feels much more like a chore
And we now have this knee-jerk reaction to aggressively cut through fluff even when there's actually no fluff.
Back in the day the list of shopping Sundays would be printed in my pocketbook calendar that I'd buy in early January. And it would be a simple list without all the "...shopping for goods is such an important part of life, you need to eat after all (sometimes too much, am I right!). But did you know that on some days..." BS. Because paper is an actual commodity, and no editor would publish a pocketbook calendar the size of a brick. Unlike paper though, kilobytes cost nothing, so there you go.
Or blog posts that explain every little thing related to a topic before the information you searched for. In your case, for the article "Shops that are open on Sunday in 2022", <h2> titles would be:
"What is Sunday?"
"What is shopping?"
"Why you should prefer to shop on Sundays?"
"Is the distance to the shop important?"
"Remember to carry money"
etc...
It bursts at seams with brilliant "do not say!" type of tutorials - one my favorites is "How to Survive a Coup". Here's some of the advice given by the expert authors (who clearly must have survived a few coups back in the day):
"The most important thing to do during a coup is to stay out of range of gunfire [...] Stay tuned into social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to get regular updates on what is happening [...] If you have television, then you can also try watching your local news channel for updates [...] Leave the country or go to a safer region if the conflict continues"
So remember, try staying out of range of gunfire and don't forget to subscribe, everyone
For avoiding channels that are effectively spam, 'Channel Blocker' is helpful by adding an 'x' button you can click to block videos from that channel from being displayed. Another one, 'BlockTube' is good too which lets you auto-block videos based on keywords in video titles.
What else did you want on a video site? You just think they should not include their faces in the videos?
Body language. Expression.
For example when trying to find physical hardware reviews (basically the only reason I can think of where a video can be more preferable to something written). And yet it is incredible how many reviewers think you'll be happy to stare at their faces for the majority of the "review"; practically all this runtime is them advertising themselves.
There's little better than watching someone walk you through something new, especially when there's a good bit of exact configuration to get right.
As for other content, who knows. There's SO much stuff on youtube, stuff I wouldn't begin to know how to find. I'm sure most of it is of low value to most people, but I think some people just use it as a creative outlet, or a place to talk (with no viewers).
And there's something tragic about people making content in their homes and reading out a marketing script about some crap for a minute.
The majority of videos have about ~3 minutes of the actual content that you’re interested in and 7 minutes of just pure fluff and fillers.
Same principle as reddit really - if content is being pushed into your face, it's probably worth avoiding. Seek out the high quality, less marketed content, subscribe to that and ignore what the algorithms send your way.
Just a few years ago, you could search for anything, even current-political, and find a bunch of videos from a bunch of people, from "best trump insults" to "why xyz is bad?" .... but now, all the top search results about anything remotely current (be it politics, covid, russia/ukraine, crime, heatwaves,...), all you get is mainstream media (cnn, msnbc,....). If I wanted to watch CNN, I'd watch CNN, not youtube.
Add to this all the blatant demonetization of anything remotely non-politically-correct, discussing anything current, or even using a bad word.
For me, youtube has become in 90% just one more "cable tv" channel... mainstream media, and a few large media houses pushing their shitty videos. There are only a few channels left that I actually enjoy, and even those are producing less and less content every year.
I think this has nothing to do with monetization per se, it was an explicit decision taken by YT and hard-coded into the search and recommendations algorithms in light of the craze about "fake news".
It's very funny to notice when looking at videos from new media creators - even though I am subscribed, Like most videos I watch, watch them till the end etc, I will almost always get "redirected" to a mainstream news video if Auto-play is on, at least after 2-3 videos.
Add in the algorithm preferring new content and channels that publish new videos frequently (weekly or more), making it essentially a full time job staying relevant.
Youtube money is not enough to pay for living in high cost of living countries any more. Almost every popular channel I follow is mostly funded by Patreon etc these days.
The people who made a living on YouTube started in the early 2010s or so. And I have understood that most of them aren't primarily funded by tube moneys any more.
There is some interesting stuff coming from low cost of living countries like India, Bangladesh and in particular Vietnam. Not enough to offset the loss of creators from western countries.
I have not seen a new and interesting channel by anyone living in America or Europe in many years.
But a lot of creators just quit.
There is no platform that is sucking creators out of youtube, there just isn't enough money from ad funded free content to keep it up.
Do you have a source for that? As far as I know, the YT revenue share has been stable (at 55% to the creator) for like 15 years.
The revenue split may have stayed the same but the revenue total has gone down, despite the huge increase in the number of ads.
E.g. Mathias Wandel has discussed the financial side of running YouTube if you want to dig deeper.